In April of '08 Disney announced plans to animate Philip K. Dick's story The King of the Elves. Since then, there's been very little news about the urban fantasy endeavor. Did Disney kill off their paranoid, twisted elf tale?

It seemed that mouse house was interested in turning Dick's story into a Lord of the Rings type tale and even added it to their upcoming projects slate on the Disney web page later this year, complete with fancy old timey font...

Slashfilm recently pointed out that Disney webpage which slated the film for Christmas 2012 as a CG 3D production, is gone. The page is still there, but you can no longer navigate to it from the Disney home page. Plus, there's an ongoing discussion at the animation site Tag Blog claiming that the project has been canned.

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It's not looking good for this Dick project. Which is sad, because we would have loved to see Disney work more with this kind of material. We miss the stories like The Sword In the Stone and its copy-cat films like The Black Cauldron in the fantasy-rich 80s. No doubt Peter Jackson's The Hobbit will help spark another fantasy movie uprising, but we'd love to see the younger generations exposed to this type of rich storytelling. Culminating with a Supernatural film.

Here's the official synopsis from PKD's story:

An ordinary man living in the Mississippi Delta, whose reluctant actions to help a desperate band of elves leads them to name him their new king. Joining the innocent and endangered elves as they attempt to escape from an evil and menacing troll, their unlikely new leader finds himself caught on a journey filled with unimaginable dangers, and a chance to bring real meaning back to his life.